1. Field
The following description relates to a method, a computer-readable storage medium, an apparatus, and a medical imaging system for segmenting an image of an object from an image of an organ.
2. Description of the Related Art
For patient-specific organ modeling, necessary information may be obtained from a medical image of the patient such as a computed tomography (CT) image or a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) image. This process, which isolates an object from pictures of an organ, is referred to as a segmentation. For this image segmentation, methods of segmenting an image of a desired object from an image of an organ based on a known shape of the organ or directly segmenting an object from an image of an organ of a patient by a user have been used. Additionally, methods of using well-known shapes of organs have been used.
It is difficult to segment a complicated organ that has a tree structure such as a liver or a blood vessel of a kidney. This task is difficult because of the complexity of shapes of organs, and also because information about organs disappears or overlaps with one another due to problems related to resolution, timing requirements, and/or other characteristics of medical imaging apparatuses. Nevertheless, various segmentation methods have been proposed to provide operational solutions to these problems due to the importance of imaging organs such as blood vessels.
However, in currently existing approaches, factors such as the disappearance of information about items such as blood vessels or the like or issues related to overlapping parts is not considered, and hence such information is not automatically used to help address the problems discussed above.